Hey Pinterest people! If you’re like me you may not always think about optimizing your site or images for Pinterest. I’m not a big “pinner” myself, but I noticed that a chunk of our traffic at Tiny Shiny Home was being driven by some very popular pins.

In my last article, I talked about some quick ways to level up your Craft CMS blog. I mentioned that on my family's travel blog, we like to include a map of locations we talk about in each post. Nathaniel Davis asked in the comments if I could share more details on how that map is setup so here we are!

Recently I moved my family’s travel blog from ExpressionEngine to Craft CMS. You can read about the why here, but I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about some of the things I’ve learned building a travel blog with Craft.

It only took 5 years, but I have finally gotten around to designing a proper homepage for my family’s travel site. No longer just a list of blog entries, it’s a full-on proper landing page intended to tell our story and guide visitors to the place they want to go.

Did you know that the nomination window for DesignHope is quickly drawing to a close? Well, it is. But before you make that mad dash to go nominate your favorite brand I wanted to tell you a bit more about the awesome companies that have stepped up and offered their services to help us make this a reality.

We announced the brand new DesignHope last week, and wanted to share the video we made to tell people why we're doing it. Sometimes it's easy to make something look great, but harder to tell the story behind it.

Eight years ago we launched DesignHope - the economy had tanked, people were getting laid off and starting their own projects and we wanted to help. We promised a logo and website for the winner. Hundreds of people applied and sponsors jumped in to help. It was one of my favorite moments at FortySeven Media - for real.

Today I’m introducing a leaner, meaner FortySeven Media. I know what you’re thinking. I kind of already did that a while back when Nate jumped off to start his own adventure. True. But not much changed after he left.

The last week we've been staying at this great little campground called Lake Harmony RV Resort. Somehow we managed to get the absolute best spot in the whole place - right down on the water. We've really enjoyed our time here.

Did I mention my family and I are traveling full time now? In case you missed it, check out our blog here. Let's just say that in the past 6 months I've run across a ton of brands in bunch of different places. This is one story of a lesson I learned when dining in the Adirondacks.

Friends, I have a lot to tell you. So sit down, pull up a chair, grab some milk and cookies and get ready. It's story time!

The Discontent

It all started several years ago - a slow, subtle gnawing in the pit of my stomach. Our business was great, my kids were healthy and happy, and my relationship with my wife was better than ever. But I couldn't shake this feeling that most of our day-to-day lives seemed - empty.

I was asked to give a talk at a gathering of guys who were trying to be better husbands and fathers - and before I knew it I had an entire presentation of why I was discontented. I dug into books like “Linchpin,” researched all kinds of statistics about home ownership and global income, and realized that I was having trouble reconciling all the time and money our big beautiful house was costing us.

In fact, I was having trouble reconciling what the American Dream was necessitating on multiple fronts - from debt to consumerism to education and beyond. The things everyone else seemed to care about and spend so much time and money on were slowly losing their meaning for me.

My wife felt this, too and had talked many times of traveling more. Exposing ourselves to people and situations outside our comfort zone. Maybe even of traveling full-time, ditching the house and mortgage and exploring the US on our own terms. We knew a few people who had done it. Could we do it, too? With 4 kids?

It also happens that 2015 is bringing about some ginormous changes, and I've been thinking back to how we got here. Needless to say there were lots of things that were thought, and the thinking gave me a few nuggets that I'd like to start sharing with you.

First up? Perspective.

When we start out we do it for the love of the craft. Mine was art and design - and soon became clean, standards based front-end markup that evolved into a full stack process from branding all the way to a finished content-managed site.

My drive was to do an excellent job artistically and technically, making a truly awesome brand and website for my clients.

While this obviously still exists, I've come to realize it's not the most important thing. (You may be having trouble computing this statement. Bear with me, keep reading. I'll get there.)

When you're starting out, any job is a good job, right? Without that steady stream of income, you move into fight or flight mode and take whatever comes your way. And that's ok in the beginning.

But pretty soon you'll start to notice patterns. Some projects go really well and others don't. Some clients are great to work with and others make you want to break stuff.

Now there's probably an entire book that needs to be written about “why” certain clients and projects don't mesh with you. Maybe I'll get to that soon. For now, though - I'm going to assume you're smart enough to know the kind of people you want to work with (hint: they have the same beliefs, goals and integrity system that you do).

All that to say - there will quickly come a point where you'll need to start pre-filtering your clients. How do we do this? Here's a few ways:

Alright, it's almost March. So that means you've got those feeble New Years Resolutions wrapped up and you've got your googly-eyed Valentine's Day mushy stuff taken care of for the year. What does that mean? It means it's business time!

That's why we (FortySeven Media and Bright Newt) are all kinds of excited to tell you that our newest business course is available! This is a streamlined, focused look at making the most money your business can make. What's it called? Freakishly Profitable.

Overnight successes rarely happen overnight. It's easy to look at those around us that have “made it” or “arrived.” It's easy to imagine them with their perfect lives, enjoying every aspect of their success, rolling in piles of money while genuinely enjoying every single thing they do all day.

The truth is rarely that simple, though. Hard work is hard. It's not always fun. And you'll probably have to do a lot of it before you finally see your passion project catch and take flight.